Thursday, January 27, 2011

Scores of antisemitic books published in Iran

By Daniel Ullrich, Threedots

By GARY BAUMGARTEN

The Iranian leadership can’t stomach saying the word “Israel.” Instead, they refer to Israel as the “Zionist state.”

They do this for two reasons.

First, they don’t want to acknowledge even the existence of the state of Israel. Secondly, if they call Israel the Zionist, rather than the Jewish state, they hope they can avoid being labeled antisemites.

But the proof of the regime’s tolerance for Jews is in, not the pudding, but in the books.

The Aladdin Project, which seeks to build bridges between Jews and Muslims, says that, in the last International Book Fair in Tehran, there were, on display,160 volumes that were strongly antisemitic in content.

The books weren’t all just published last year. They date back to 2005. But their inclusion in the fair symbolizes the regime’s intolerance for religious tolerance.

And yes, among the tones on display, the long-ago discredited and still often referred to by those who wish to justify blood libel against Jews Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

There were more contemporary offerings too, the Aladdin Project notes, like the spiffy Death of a Myth: Views of President Ahmadinejad on the Holocaust. Published by the office of the Iranian Education ministry, this “text book” is being disseminated into schools across the land. To indoctrinate the young minds of Iran into President Mahmoud Ahmdinejad’s revisionist “history” into a Holocaust that he labels a myth.

The Aladdin Project says it took care to only list those books that were particularly egregious in their antisemitism. Many others that had significant antisemitic content were excluded from the list.

Next time someone tries to tell you that Ahmadinejad and the Supreme Leader didn’t really mean to say that Israel should be eliminated from the face of the Earth, that the people who translated the Farsi were either mistaken, unschooled in the language or had a hidden agenda, remember this report.

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Gary Baumgarten is news and programing director at the Paltalk News Networkwhere you can talk to him at 5 PM New York time Monday-Friday.